The central objective of the paper is to explore how ‘foreignness’ mediated by material objects in transitional spaces, like academic offices in universities and classrooms and dormitories in schools, act as ‘quasi-museums’ and constitute transitional cosmopolitan spaces/places that speak to cosmopolitan subjectivities inflected through transnational engagements.

The paper examines the entangled relationship between cultural production in transitional spaces/places at Wellesley College in the USA and Miss Tsuda’s School for Girls, Tokyo, Japan. Both were linked by what Geyer (2009) terms a transnational circulatory regime that facilitated Japanese students studying in the USA and American women educationists visiting Japan to support the education of Japanese women. The paper focuses on the academic office of Sophie Hart, professor of English at Wellesley College, USA, which was filled with objects from Japan, China and Korea that she described as ‘loot’ collected on her educational travels in the ‘East’, and included a large, elaborately brass-bound desk that was once a Korean chest, a large picture of an old eighteenth century Chinese scholar framed by gilt carved wood, brass temple lamps from Japan, teak elephants from Rangoon, a brass bowl from Tibet and carved white jade (Wellesley News, 5 November 1936). The original building of Miss Tsuda’s School for Girls in Tokyo,  which Hart visited on several occasions, consisted of a single school building and three dormitories that looked very like ordinary Japanese houses. Hung on the wall in almost every room was a tablet bearing the name of a foreign person with some verses underneath, inscribed in English. These were the names of the American friends of the founder of the school, Tsuda Umeko, who were supporting the school financially (Mishima, 1941, p.59).

 The paper is informed theoretically by the growing body of transnational historical scholarship based around entangled histories (Werner and Zimmerman, 2006) that links cosmopolitanism, women and education (Goodman, 2010). It also draws on notions of vernacular cosmopolitanisms that have distinctive manifestations in different settings (Sobe, 2012, p. 268) and notions of the 'West’ as imagined space and invented tradition (Kelsey, 2006, p.7). It is informed, too, by scholarship on the visual culture of schooling (Howard and Burke, 2013), and writing on the ‘space of the foreign’ that treats public and private spaces/places as contact zones, and places of encounter (Hoghanson, 2007, p.9).

The paper will ask particular questions about ways in which forms of decoration in academic offices and rooms in schools perform aspects of cosmopolitanism; how they link to cosmopolitan subjectivities and to cosmopolitan stances, dispositions, habits and desires (Sobe, 2012, p.267); and how they provide ways to participate in empire. The paper will also ask questions about how material objects related to ‘East’ and ‘West’ as tropes provide a fluid basis for internationalist self-formation, transformation and ‘becoming’;  and how in the case of Hart, these relate to questions of professional identity and her travels in Europe (Russia, Poland etc.) as well as Asia.

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